Odessa Again (5 page)

21 Hours … 20 Hours … 19 Hours … 18 Hours … 17 Hours …

Imagine everything you’d do over if given the chance.

That thing you said at lunch that made everybody laugh because it was stupid?

Forgotten.

The humiliating
thwack
of the dodgeball against your thigh and the red mark it left behind?

Erased.

The misunderstanding that sent you to the “take a break” chair, when you weren’t really talking during social studies, you were only asking Jeffrey Mandel to return your pencil?

Over.

These are the sorts of things that sent Odessa back to the center of her attic floor, the rug rolled up and stashed near the bookcase. She would shut her eyes tight, hold her breath, and jump.

She jumped to undo something about her day that had gone a way she didn’t like.

What power.

How easy.

Still, there were choices to make.

What needed undoing?

And was undoing it worth living the whole day over again? Worth using up another jump back in time?

What about the things she would have to endure for a second time just to change the one thing she wanted to undo?

Take the farting incident.

Odessa knew that a loud fart could be a good thing
if
you
happened
to
be
a
boy
.

If
you
happened
to
be
a
girl,
farting was a whole different story. It was something to be avoided at all costs. Something to live in mortal fear of. But living in mortal fear of something doesn’t mean it won’t happen to you.

Like vomiting. Odessa feared vomiting, but sometimes she’d get the stomach flu. Usually right after Oliver got it, because in addition to being a toad, Oliver was a walking germ-festOdessa feared shots. But she got them. She was afraid of thunder, but that didn’t keep storms from coming.

Odessa feared farting.

In front of other people.

Especially farting in front of somebody who looked cute since he’d stopped cutting his hair. Somebody she
like-
liked.

But still, it happened in front of Theo Summers.

During math.

Multiplication tables, to be precise.

Theo looked at her and she looked away, but she could feel how hot her face was. She didn’t need a mirror to know she’d turned scarlet. Lobster-colored. This happened when she got embarrassed, and it was why her mother sometimes called her “Odessa Red-Light.” Like getting stuck with the hyphenated
Green-Light
wasn’t annoying enough—even her own mother teased her about it. Her own mother, who along with her father, had
de-
hyphenated the whole family.

Odessa waited for Theo to make some joke to Bryce Bratton. But he didn’t. And because of this, because he quickly looked down at the math problems on the hexagonal table between them, Odessa’s
like-
like blossomed into full-blown love.

But Theo knew.

He had heard.

And he’d never forget.

This left Odessa with no choice but to go home and jump through the floor.

Still, there were parts of this day she didn’t want to relive.

On the day of the farting incident, Odessa had a checkup after school at which she received not one, but three shots. And that night there was a terrible thunderstorm. The window-shaking kind. The kind that made her rethink wanting to sleep in a room alone.

But neither shots nor thunderstorms seemed very big at all when stacked up next to the horror of Theo Summers hearing her fart.

So that night, as the thunder rattled her bones and the lightning lit up the darkening sky outside her window, Odessa rolled up her cheetah-print rug.

They’d just finished dessert. Chocolate banana pudding wasn’t her favorite, but it was a close second. When she considered living through the shots and the thunder again, she thought:
At
least
there’ll be pudding!

Odessa tapped her toe on the exposed floorboards.

The thunder crackled outside. Terrifying. A sound like the whole world splitting in two. It reminded Odessa of the time she and Oliver dropped a watermelon out their bedroom window onto the back patio just to see what would happen.

What happened was that Mom got really mad.

Hurry! Jump. Get away from the thunder. Wake up again, start the day fresh, and avoid that terrible Odessa Red-Light moment.

But going back seventeen hours was different from leaving something behind.

The shots and the thunderstorm were still in front of her because … tomorrow wasn’t really tomorrow.

Once she jumped, tomorrow would become today all over again.

16 Hours

Things might have continued this way, with Odessa correcting all of her awkward, embarrassing, unfortunate moments. The pesky happenstances that are a part of any fourth grader’s life.

Things might have continued like this but for one simple fact: Odessa Green-Light was a curious girl.

The type who sought to understand why certain things were so. It was this part of her that hated spelling and its nonsensical rules.

So Odessa went in search of answers.

She wished more than anything that Claire was still speaking to her. They were friends last year when they were both in Room 22. They weren’t best friends, but Claire was fun, and curious,. She was logical and clear-headed too. Back in third grade they’d read a whole series of mysteries about a boy named Benedict, and Claire had always solved the mystery
before
Benedict did. She didn’t have to cheat and skip to the end to see how it all turned out, like Odessa.

But now Claire put her backpack on the seat next to her on the bus, the seat that used to be Odessa’s, and they weren’t in the same class this year. Odessa was in Room 28 with Sofia, which was nice, but not necessary, because Sofia was her best friend no matter what classroom they were in.

If Claire had still been speaking to her she might have been able to think three steps ahead like she had with the Benedict books and help Odessa find some answers about the attic floor. But no. Odessa was going to have to figure this out on her own.

Like she often did when things perplexed her, she opened up her hummingbird journal. She wrote down the things she understood, underlining them for emphasis.

Time is running out.

Each time she jumped she lost one hour, one chance.

There are only twenty-four chances.

Twenty-four opportunities to redo something, and now, with only sixteen opportunities left, she started to wonder: Had she frittered away the first eight?

I’ve been stupid.

She had no regrets about the farting incident, but the “take a break” chair? The red mark of the dodgeball and its
thwack
?

What a waste.

She began to understand the need to hoard her remaining opportunities.

Sixteen left. Sixteen!

She made a final note in her journal:

Don’t be impulsive. Make it matter. Think!

Weeks went by.

The air grew colder. The leaves went from green to red to brown before abandoning the trees altogether. The sky outside Odessa’s dormer window turned black before dinnertime.

Dad and Jennifer were planning a spring wedding. Odessa’s every other weekend with them was spent tasting cake and looking at flowers and trying on dresses. Odessa finally picked out a lavender one with spaghetti straps, which meant Oliver would have to wear a lavender tie, and she was looking forward to seeing that. He never wore anything but T-shirts and cutoff sweatpants.

Jennifer brought home samples of music for the reception. She’d play it full blast in the house and practice her dance moves. Dad would smile and shake his head. Jennifer knew how to make Dad laugh, which was good because sometimes Dad could be too serious. Sometimes, Odessa would even dance with her.

All the wedding preparation reminded Odessa of when she and Sofia used to play princesses. Neither of them really wanted to be princesses—who could stand itchy clothes and perfect posture all the time?—but it was still loads of fun to pretend.

The only thing Odessa looked forward to with winter’s arrival was the freezing of the pond near her Uncle Milo’s, where he took her ice-skating on Saturday afternoons. He took Oliver too, because Odessa never seemed to get to do anything, or go anyplace, without Oliver the toad.

On a particularly gloomy Saturday, Uncle Milo, Odessa, and Oliver went to check out the pond, skates in the trunk, hot cocoa in the thermos, but it hadn’t frozen over completely yet. Big shards of ice floated haphazardly, like pieces of a puzzle that would never fit together.

Oliver thought he spied a rabbit and went bounding off after it, maybe thinking he could coax it into his hands like that field mouse, and Odessa took the rare opportunity afforded by this moment alone with Uncle Milo to ask him some questions.

Uncle Milo was her mother’s younger brother. Once he’d told Odessa a story about how when they were kids Mom had convinced him to do a trust fall backward so she could catch him. He closed his eyes, crossed his arms, and fell backward, but then she stepped out of the way and he cracked his head open on the kitchen floor. Odessa thought this was pretty funny, in the way things are funny when they’re the opposite of what you expect. She couldn’t picture her mother letting her brother fall on his head, because Mom was the one who always told Odessa how she needed to show Oliver more
kindness.